The Answer Is Surprising! EV vs Hybrid: What's The Most Fuel Efficient AWD Car? - Thrifty 3 Ep.8

Well, this is

what

I propose. Why don't we take a little mini road trip today? You can see the front electric motor, the rear electric motor, the battery and then where the power is going at any given time. I'm going to time Tommy to see. how long does it take to fill up squeeze it a little more yeah now the moment of truth comes okay here's our drop down menu loading on Friday May 10th Hey guys welcome to episode eight of our Thrifty Three series and today It's a special day because I challenged Tommy to bring the

most

fuel

-

efficient

four-wheel drive car sold in America to find out if it's cheaper to drive a traditional four-wheel drive internal combustion engine car or a Tesla with dual motor and four-wheel drive, so Tommy has brought. a

hybrid

tommy, you brought the prius, I didn't bring any old prius, although this is the all-wheel drive prius and this is the

most

efficient

all-wheel drive gas car you can buy, yes, and of course we have twice as many.

Long range Tesla engine making it one of the most

fuel

efficient all-wheel drive electric cars you can buy, so we need proof,

what

do you say? We do it well, this is what I propose, why don't we go in a small mini? road trip today yes, go up into the mountains about 36 miles to estes park colorado 36 miles down and we'll see how much it costs to fill the prius with gas and the tesla with electricity from a supercharger yes, I like that, basically We're not talking about the circuit traditional fuel economy, but we're talking about how much money it actually costs, so we'll go up to Spark, yeah, then we'll have lunch there, yeah, and we'll come down, are you full?

This is already up, yes, so I completed it, it's ready to go. And did you turn the Tesla over? Did you fill the Tesla? The Tesla is all loaded, so when we get down, we'll fill this up again, yeah, and see what the pump says. and we'll take it to the supercharger and see what Tesla says, we're having a hard time charging it, yeah, sure, and that's coming up right now, so this video is about taking the technology to the next level, so why don't you show them how? you fill up the kona if we were at a gas station oh you're just fine wow one step so if you like your smartphone you'll probably like the tesla if you're an old fashioned analog person you'll probably hate the tesla because it doesn't fit A lot of nothing analog in this vehicle.

Hey, before we head to Essex Park, tell me, did I buy something from you because

hybrid

s are inherently the least cool vehicle, so I know you know that. a young college graduate and you want to be cool so let me show you what I got you dude check this out oh flat pill now you're cool I love it hey speaking of cool you didn't even bother to wash the Tesla, uh, yeah, that's a problem. I'm afraid to wash it because as you can see it's still damaged. It's been three weeks since someone backed up and damaged it.

And I'm afraid to wash it because I don't want to. water gets inside the light and then the light will stop working and then it won't be legal so it's dirty and we're still waiting to hear from Tesla and hopefully our repair shop on when we can get parts with this thing to That Actually, we can figure it out, let's get on the road, come on, you know, it's very difficult to compare the fuel efficiency of an electric car with that of a hybrid, an ice car, or in other words, a car with an engine internal combustion because they use different forms of energy, so this test.

It's really cool because it basically compares how much each car costs to drive. Now keep in mind that we are doing this in the typical tfl way and that tommy will fill or has filled the prius and we are going to do this. ride to estes park and back and then we'll fill it up again at the station and see not only what the car says but what the pump says and I'm going to take it to a supercharger and see how much Tesla charges to fill this up, I guess with electrons. Now keep in mind that the cost of electricity varies depending on when it fills up, so if it fills up during midday when businesses are using their air conditioners and heaters, then the cost.

Electricity consumption is higher, as they fill up at night it becomes cheaper and of course that depends on your local utility, but this is a great way to see what the real costs of light travel are. highway vs trying to compare mpg to mpge last time I supercharged this car Tesla charged me 5.75 cents to fill it up and there we'll know after supercharging it again how much Tesla is charging us now that it's built right into my credit card , so I'll never actually have to. Even swipe a card, as you can see now I have 274 miles of range left, but if you look there most of my battery is full.

I have it set to the typical factory setting of about 277,278 miles of range. I'm not happy if you fill them completely. This is a long range dual motor so it has a range of over 300 miles but we're not using all of that range we're only using about 278 or 277 miles and of course. There's my power consumption and I can change it from instant to average, so I have about 266 miles of instant range, depending on how I'm driving right now. I have 240 miles of range so this line here shows me how much power I'm using in real time if I let off the throttle you can see that green line going to the left that means I'm regenerating a lot more power into the battery and yeah , I'm basically driving with one foot, this has such powerful regeneration that I don't even need to use the brake and in fact it's so powerful when I let off the accelerator that if I'm slowing down the brake lights come on by themselves so if you look at my little tesla here every time i let off the accelerator the brake lights come on welcome to the toyota prius and this is a car that a lot of you car guys really aren't a big fan of because of what it represents and how it works . about their business, but it's a car that I personally love.

I think it's a really interesting piece of technology and so I really respect what it does and how it does it. Now this Prius costs around 32,000, which in my opinion is a tremendous amount of value. For what you get, love it or hate it, the styling is certainly unique, but once you start to dive into what you get for that $32 grand, it's actually pretty impressive. First of all, this previous all-wheel drive has been available in Japan for a while. now, but it just came to the US with this car and the all-wheel drive system is super unique.

Now in the front you have the 121 horsepower gasoline engine and the electric motor that drives the front wheels like any other Prius, but in the back you have a really small seven horsepower electric motor that It drives only the rear wheel, so there is no physical mechanical connection between the front and rear. Now the advantage of that little seven horsepower motor in the back is that it's kind of a little auxiliary motor, now with what Toyota is thinking. This car really only needs all-wheel drive when accelerating away from a slippery surface or in certain conditions if the front wheels really spin, so the electric motor only kicks in when absolutely necessary, what that means is that it's more active. between zero and six miles per hour when you're accelerating, for example in the snow, so you don't get stuck and it completely disengages at 43 miles per hour, so right now cruising at about 60 it's doing nothing, which means is that The combined mpg is 50 miles per gallon in this all-wheel drive Prius, which makes it the most efficient gasoline engine you know because it has an electric system, but it is a gasoline-powered vehicle that you can buy or, like the tesla people call it ice internal combustion engine so you have heated seats in this xle for both the front driver and the front passenger and they heat them up they are like leatherette style seats but they are incredibly comfortable some which many of the older Priuses really lacked.

You also have heated steering. steering wheel here, press the button and the steering wheel gets nice and warm, also, speaking of climate, automatic climate, so automatic, you just set the temperature and then you have some ego settings, you don't want to activate the air conditioning system, but set it and turn it off. Wow now, other things you'll see about this above is a really easy to use and really convenient infotainment system, given that it's pretty small and we don't have satellite radio on this one, which kind of sucks, but the system itself is practically perfect audio bluetooth aux usb cd really basic stuff and you also have some fun things on the screen like a power monitor so you can see the front electric motor, the rear electric motor, the battery and then where the power goes at a moment's notice given You also have an additional set of screens up here and they do some really interesting things.

On the left you have your trip computer and speedometer, but the screen on the right is super configurable, so this, for example, is my all-wheel drive screen. and shows you where the energy is going and how it is directed. We also have an eco diary so you can track your average mpg over several days. Ecological savings. Your driving monitor tells you how you're driving, elapsed time, a fuel consumption log, and then this is it. My favorite is a system indicator that tells you your score, so how efficiently you're driving, which is 43 out of 100, which, to be honest, isn't that brilliant.

You also get some EV lights and essentially a throttle indicator. that tells you when you're driving aggressively or when you're regenerating by sliding left. Another weird thing about the all wheel drive prius e is that the battery is different from a standard prius. The previous standard uses a lithium-ion battery. The car actually uses a nickel metal hydride battery and I've read that that's because they perform better in the cold and Toyota predicts that these all-wheel drive Priuses will be sold in cold climates because that's where it snows and pours rain. front-wheel drive, but it's worth noting that it weighs about 150 pounds more than a standard front-drive Prius.

You might be wondering why we're going to ask this park well because first of all, there's a supercharger up there, not that we will be. using it, but I want to check it out just to see what it looks like, it probably looks like all the others, but it's good to know there is one right next to Rocky Mountain National Park, but most importantly it's an uphill shot, So it will be uphill for the most part on the way there and downhill on the way back, so I am very curious to see if I will actually regenerate the energy coming back from us.

This rock park is rolling uphill and downhill. When we get to Estes Park we'll get some lunch, maybe check the supercharger and then I'll be curious to see how much power I can muster in the Tesla on the way back now that Tommy, of course, has it. regeneration too, but with this puny little battery it doesn't do much, at least not in the same way that the Tesla regenerates power in terms of direct competition, how do these two vehicles compete? The all wheel drive system on the tesla is a dual motor so it's on all the time and that's fine, we recently updated the software and it gave us an extra five miles per hour top speed so I think it's about 145 or 50 miles per hour top speed and it's all wheel drive all the time.

You may also be wondering how the Model 3 handles corners and you know, the Prius is much better. I have high performance tires, at least much better than the Prius. I have a lot more torque and I think we have a suspension that is set up for a much sportier ride. If you're really curious about how good or bad this is on a race track, check out our Hot or Not series where Paul, our race driver, took the high-performance version of this model. 3 and we put it to the test, not only did we get a 0-60 time, but we also got the chance to see how it grips when things get a little twisty like this, so as easy as you can imagine, let's throw it in . it's hard to get off the line it turns pretty well putting power down a lot of traction stability control going a little further up the hill so we're pretty much going uphill at this point from Boulder Colorado to Estes Park it's a little undulating but it's a lot of uphill um and the prius is a cvt and it beeps over and over again once you're going up the hill now my mileage is very good at the flat we were getting you know 53 54 but now we've been going uphill for several mileswe get down to 40 degrees uh and if I'm honest there's not as much cornering brilliance here, not bad, but it's certainly more designed for long open roads than canyon carving, the steering is artificially light and the throttle.

The pedal doesn't do much when you really push it now, the priest is pretty good off the line because you have that instant torque from the electric motors, but once you move it it goes off, however that doesn't really matter because not many of You are buying the Prius 4, the performance, the handling and the fun in the mountains. What they buy the Prius for is its ease of use and cool features, and there are plenty of them, including the best wireless charging pad I've ever seen. Too easy. to use it it's down here in the middle and it's big it's in charge it's easy to see it's easy to place the phone it's perfect it fits all types of phones I love it unlike the model 3 this prius has a front screen so I don't have I have to take my eyes off the road to see what speed I'm doing and, if you want a little more driving fun, if you want the accelerator pedal to really feel like it's not made of mush.

There is a drive mode button where you can put it in eco mode or normal power and on power it activates. Now it is much faster for this trip because we are testing the efficiency or the cost of filling the vehicles. I'll leave it in eco mode. There's also an EV mode that works at really low speeds, like less than 20 miles per hour. I do not need it. Because we're pretty much on this little two-lane road, we're going 45. So I have a range of about 216 miles and we didn't go whatever, we had 277, so we went 50 miles less than that. but it was all uphill it's about 35 yeah yeah so I'm curious to see how much we'll make up on the way back if we get some lunch let's get lunch.

I know a good restaurant, but it's not. here it is in the city okay so I have the uh roni for tesla and it's a little confusing because we're talking about mpge here so we're doing this to really know how much it costs because tesla gets 120 in the city 112 highway and 116 mpge combined and it says it uses 29 kilowatt hours per 100 miles 29 kilowatt hours per hour yeah yeah well the prius gets 52 city, 48 highway, 50 combined, that of course is mpg because it's gas. car, but let's go to the pump to see how much it costs to refill them to where they work now, how much does your car cost?, yeah, well, this car sticker is worth fifty-six thousand seven hundred and the last one is only 32,146, so in the above there is a lot of value, of course you could get the base model tree for much less.

I think the number that does make sense is the annual fuel cost because that's really what we're going to measure, so what's your let's say 750, yeah mine is 550. That's not that different, well 200 less a year, nothing, so we'll find out if it's what percentage would be 30 less about giving or receiving, so we'll find out if that happens. This will be the case when we return to Boulder and fill yours and connect mine. We're going down the mountain now and you'll see my score has increased dramatically on this ride since I restarted on an estus so 75. out of 100 points the score resets every time we turn the car off and that's because it's all downhill and when I'm going downhill the prius regenerates when I use the brake especially you can see the little blue bar extends and then when I have to accelerate just a little bit because my battery is getting full I can run it in electric only mode once again not on ev mode I'm not pushing the button, I'm still letting the car figure it out, but because I'm just turning off the engines so it doesn't need to run, it's running all the accessories on the battery or just cruising and the battery charge is there, it's cool, it shows you how much charge is in the battery, but it doesn't really matter because the car manages the battery percentage to keep it in the optimal range and you'll never want to run out of battery because the prius is smarter than you.

So if I had to guess I'd say you're at 210 miles range after the mountain, yeah I mean we came down the mountain, it regenerated and I was a 208 and I'm at 213. oh so you're five miles, I I have five miles, but we also went, you know, probably another, 10 miles, yeah. I'm sure it is, we're about 50 now so I didn't regenerate well, I did a lot, but I don't know how much in terms of miles because it's a hybrid, but I have a full battery so I'm good to go. to the gas station your battery is about the size of my phone buddy no yeah it's like it's that big it's heavy it's big it's a big brick maybe twice the size of my phone yeah okay , anyway, we're back in Boulder and, uh, it's weird. being at a gas station in a tesla, I'm going to time Tommy to see how long it takes to fill it up because it's obviously going to take me a little bit longer to do it, so let's stop looking here and get started, that's how long it takes. for him to go and do it right so we're paying here at our local gas station let's see for 277 unleaded essentially so it's still under three dollars now of course this will be different depending on where you live , people are giving me a dirty look, look at the fight there, chubby, you know they're wondering why I'm at this gas station.

Give it one more squeeze, yeah. So five dollars and 38 cents to drive up and down from Estes, yeah, yeah, so 538 people are wondering what. kind of fuel economy, I mean, we should do the math, yeah, I can do the math, you do the math, and the next stop, Tommy's less than a quarter mile from here, there's the supercharger, so we'll have a quarter mile more driving, but We'll do it next, but it's very busy here once you make the map and I'll drive the supercharger, follow me, I'll meet you there two minutes, I know, three minutes and six seconds, three minutes, yes, but yes, I had to do it.

I got the credit card. I wasn't sure what you were doing, so I could have done it in probably two minutes. So let me show you something here. I timed Tommy. I'm going to restart it and you're going to tie me up. Yes, wait. I'll time it. We'll start now. I drove 89.1 miles, okay total, since I filled up the Prius, you know where we started, yeah, divide that by 1,943, yeah, that's gallons, so we did about 46. What did the car say? 53. Wow, that's really bad. I wonder why it is turned off. It's a long way off, uh, yeah, yeah, but still 46 is amazing considering we went uphill quite a bit and then came back downhill, and the question is how much was five dollars and 38 cents in total, so let's see about using the supercharger here in Boulder if the tesla is cheaper yeah I'm going to say it's pretty much the same, we're charging at peak times right now yeah we'll see so what do you want to do?

Let's go get a drink. Starbucks. Starbucks. You know, I think Tesla. It's good for Starbucks because what else are we going to do yesterday? There was beautiful sunshine and rain on Monday and when the light startled our eyes and now the charge is complete, we started around 278 and stopped at 278. How long do you think it took? There you have it, 35 minutes, yes, 10 times more, yes, more than that, eh, more than 10 times more. Do you know how Tesla charges for this? They do it differently depending on different superchargers, yes some superchargers or what Tesla recommends most superchargers. charge per kilowatt, yes sure, so it's based on how many kilowatts you put in, but depending on the region there may be different regulations and some charges per minute, okay, we don't know how ours charges, yes, on the minute actually There are two levels of cost.

Depending on how full the battery is, yes, so if you're more up to date on how it works, let us know in the comments below, we'd love to read it. Yeah, yeah, okay, let's see how much it cost us. charge the tesla, yeah, with a supercharger, right now, for the moment of truth, okay, here's our dropdown, the charge already stayed at 5.75, oh, it costs more on the tesla, it costs more on the tesla , now gas in our place cost like 270 something. Yes, if gasoline becomes very expensive and electricity remains constant, that will change, but for now the gasoline car was still cheaper.

Yeah, but I bet I had more than 40 cents fun, yeah, driving there, yeah, sure, while you know you were. a prius I would also be very curious to see how different this number would be yeah if you plugged it in at home and used it as normal power or even if you plugged it in at night you know yeah yeah that could change and if you know how they set their pricing models at the supercharging stations, let us know in the comments below, yeah, because it was basically about 100 miles for five dollars and seventy-five cents, that's like ninety-eight nine years, yeah, well, There you have it, guys. thanks for watching this episode of the

thrifty

three uh and uh come back next time what are we going to do next time tommy um I don't know we'll figure it out okay here we go, you got off to a better start my reaction time was horrible but we're neck and neck, see you later Next time, ciao, wait, what are you doing?

The most important part, yeah, oh no, that's a boring fart, why don't they make a short ripper, short, short ripper, yeah, no, you have to do the ridiculous part. I can't do that in the Prius. You know that the latest update gives us better games. No, no, no, they thought they updated it. I know I played them last night and they weren't very, not so much. better, yes, it's true, they're right, it's there, yes, then you go to Atari, much better, what do you want to play Tempest? I've never played Tempest Asteroids. Okay, apparently you can use the controls on the steering wheel.

Yes, press to start. yeah, use the controls on the steering wheel, oh yeah, look at that, how do I shoot the other wheel? here is the other wheel, yes, we have to push to start. It didn't turn out so well, it didn't turn out so well, oh, that's how you shoot there. Wow, look, I'm already mastering it. Oh yeah, oh okay, come back next time guys, ciao.